March 2009 – Into the Woods

Sound test

Hammer blow: about three-quarters of a second of reverberation

Whistling test

The drywaller finished this morning. As soon as he was gone, I took the iMac down to the house and, using the Audacity recording program, did some quick acoustic tests. A hammer blow gives about three-quarters of a second of reverberation — not bad.

I’m sure I would have chosen this house plan for the looks and layout alone. But I quickly noticed the house’s acoustic possibilities, with its high ceilings, long lines of sight, and many planes for reflecting and breaking up the sound. The organ — or any musical instruments, for that matter — should sound really good in this house. However, I would not want to live in a house this acoustically live with four children, eight television sets, and three barking dogs.

Here’s a whistling test with my out-of-tune whistling. The computer (using the built-in microphone) is downstairs in the living room. I am upstairs in the radio room balcony, facing the top of the living room, about 16 feet from the microphone.

whisting-1.mp3

House update

I planted 55 pounds of daffodils last fall. I scattered them in little clumps all around, front and back. They bloomed late, but they did well.

While the drywall crew is working, I’ve tried to catch up on some of my outdoor work, including hauling in some compost, planting more grass and clover, feeding and mulching the arbor vitae trees, and so on.

Here are the electrical boxes on the house’s side wall. The box on the right is the meter base. The big box in the middle is a transfer switch. It’s a code-compliant way of connecting the house to a generator during a power failure. The reason the box is so big, I think, is that it’s designed to transfer 200 amps under full load. As the electrician explained it to me, if a switch is closed slowly while under a 200-amp load, electrical arcing could melt the switch. So the switch is designed to open and close very quickly. When you pull the lever, it cocks a heavy spring. Then the switch release fires, and the switch opens or closes very quickly. The box on the left is a breaker box for the heat pump. Also, it’s from the box on the left where a heavy cable runs indoors to the indoor breaker box, which also is a 200-amp box.

After the drywall crew is gone (Monday?) I’ll post some interior photos. I’ve been in touch with people who’re planning to build this house (one in California, and a couple in Canada) who’d like to see more clearly what the interior looks like. The interior is hard to photograph with the lens on my camera, but I’ll do my best to do that next week.

Irish bread

All winter I’ve continued my experiments with bread pones. Though the method I use is like making biscuits, still I think the bread is more like Irish bread than anything else. Irish bread is a quick bread. It’s always brown (at least, all the Irish bread I’ve ever seen is brown). Irish bread can be made with a variety of types of flour. And Irish bread varies from day to day and from cook to cook. One of the interesting things about the food in Ireland, which is very good by the way, is sampling different cooks’ take on Irish bread. It might be served with butter as a starter. Or with soup. Or with a meal. It’s like biscuits in the American South — every cook’s version is different.

I’ve experimented with mixing generous amounts of almond meal into Irish bread, and it works very well. I have a hard time cooking with almonds. They’re hard, and if eaten whole I’m always afraid of breaking a crown or something. But, using something like a coffee grinder, fresh almonds grind into a nice, oily meal. The Irish bread above was made from King Arthur whole wheat flour, almond meal, flaxseed meal, coconut oil for shortening, and soybean milk. That’s a great mix of amino acids for improving the quality of protein — legume, seed, and nuts.

I have no way of measuring it, but I assume bread like this would be pretty low carb, for bread at least. And it’s high protein. Almonds are expensive, and probably not very fresh, if bought in little packages at the grocery store. But bought in bulk from places like Whole Foods, almonds are less expensive than a lot of meat.

The risks of eating meat

Whether meat is good for you has been debated for decades. Now we have a new study, a huge study which included 500,000 adults, and the verdict is clear: Meat is very bad for you if you eat it every day. Eating meat every day increases the chance of early death (from heart disease or cancer) by 30 percent. For women, the statistics were particularly grim. For example, women who ate the most meat every day had a 50 percent higher chance of early death from heart disease.

One of my particular interests, as many of you know, is the analysis of propaganda. The Washington Post’s story on this study (which was on the front page), has a quote from someone at the American Meat Institute:

“Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet, and studies show they actually provide a sense of satisfaction and fullness that can help with weight control. Proper body weight contributes to good health overall.”

The fallacy in the first statement is easy enough to unravel: “Meat products are part of a healthy, balanced diet.” That is precisely the point the study addressed. How did the study’s conclusions differ from what the American Meat Institute says?

The second fallacy is more difficult to unravel, because it requires knowledge that many people don’t have. The claim is that science shows that eating meat can actually make you healthier because eating meat contributes to weight control. That is intentionally misleading. It’s actually fat and protein that provide satisfaction and fullness. That fat and protein can just as easily come from vegetable sources, and it will be a whole lot better for you. This is the way most propaganda works. A claim is made that may be sorta kinda obliquely true, but the fallacy can be detected only if one is aware of some other facts.

There are so many benefits beyond health from reduced consumption of meat. Meat farms use huge amounts of water and energy, and they cause nasty pollution, both to air and water. Meats these days are particularly dangerous because they contain hormones and antibiotics that factory farm animals are pumped with. Meat production also is inefficient, because the protein fed to the animal far exceeds the protein derived from its meat.

Grass

archidave

I suspect my neighbors think I’m kidding when I say that I’m not going to mow my grass. It’s not just that I don’t want to spend the time, maintain the machines, or burn the gasoline. It’s also that I don’t want the manicured suburban look. In the above photo, gleaned off the internet, imagine how it would spoil the gothic mood of the house if it had suburban landscaping.

Drywall delivery

Of all the scary processes that have gone into building this house, I believe this is the scariest. The drywall for the second floor is brought up by a crane, through a dormer window.

The drywall contractor arrived shortly after the delivery truck. Once the drywall is all inside, the walls will start going up.

Insulation = cozy

The house’s internal systems are coming together fast. The wiring, plumbing, and heating/air conditioning ductwork are in the walls and inspected. Today, the insulation was put in. All of a sudden, the house is snug and warm. I couldn’t resist sitting by the fire for a while tonight.

The insulation inspection should happen tomorrow. On Thursday, the installation of the drywall should begin. The drywall will take five to six working days.

Above, the living room as seen from the radio room on the second floor. The radio room is a balcony and will have a railing.

Above, the radio room as seen from the upstairs bedroom. The upstairs bedroom will have an window open to the living room and will have a railing. That 2×4 is a temporary railing to keep workers from falling off the balcony.

New insulation around the gothic window

I’ve put my nerd instincts into coming up with the best security systems I can afford. Video cameras with infrared night vision, for example, watch all the doors and all sides of the house. I’ll also have motion detectors outdoors that will silently and wirelessly report any outdoor activity up to the radio room. I’ll have a panic button. My amateur radio antennas will be hidden in the attic. I’ll have battery backup for my computers and radios. Emergency communications is too important to be allowed to fail if the power goes out.

Obsessing about water

It goes without saying that sustainable living is not, um, sustainable without water. Farmers obsess about the weather, as well they should. Their livelihood depends upon the weather. Here in the Southeast, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, we’ve been in a drought. There is no shortage of surface water at present. We’ve had around 2.5 inches of rain in the past few days. But groundwater, the aquifers that feed our wells and keep our springs and streams flowing, still has not recovered from the drought years early this decade.

The United States Geological Survey maintains wells around the country to monitor groundwater levels. The two nearest me are at East Bend, North Carolina; and Mocksville, North Carolina.

The chart above shows the groundwater level at Mocksville for the past seven days. The soaking rain we’ve had for the past few days is definitely bringing up the groundwater.

The chart above shows the groundwater level at East Bend for the past 60 days. That chart, too, looks good.

Nerd note: The daily data in the chart above shows a saw-tooth periodicity that made me curious. Some quick research suggests that barometric pressure causes fluctuation in the groundwater level. But solar and lunar tides also seem to affect groundwater levels.

But if you look at the long-term Mocksville data, which is available only as far back as 1981, you can see that, long term, groundwater level is still below the mean, and we are still in a drought with an unfavorable long-term trend.

Speaking of periodicity, the groundwater level here normally falls during the warm seasons of the year and rises during the cool seasons of the year.

Scenic Stokes

Californians, note: Those are tobacco barns.Winston-Salem Journal

The Winston-Salem Journal has a story this morning on plans to expand the Hanging Rock Scenic Byway in Stokes County. The expansion would connect the tiny town of Danbury to the scenic loop.

Fifty years ago, parts of neighboring Forsyth County were scenic, with fields and barns and pastures. When developers come in, that kind of appealing terrain is their first choice of areas to slash and burn and suburbanize. Forsyth County still can’t agree on a tree ordinance, because a citizens committee wants to protect trees, and developers (in cahoots with the planning board) want to slash and burn as they please.

Let’s hope that what happened in Forsyth County doesn’t happen in Stokes.

A booger from the woods comes to get Lily

Lily, who is about nine months old now, has played outside and practiced her tree-climbing since she was a kitten. Her practice paid off this morning. A dog got her up a tree. I heard barking and ran outside with the broom. A nondescript dog I’d never seen before was bouncing around the tree, and Lily was about 20 feet up a slender, bent pine tree, holding on for dear life. I chased the dog off and made poor Lily wait while I got the camera to record her humiliation. I was afraid she’d be afraid to climb down, but she made a very well-controlled descent, first head-first, then tail first, and came to me with her fur ruffled to be petted.

I’ve always told her that there are boogers in the woods, but she doesn’t need to be told. She hears the boogers all the time, though this is the first time one ever came to get her.

Now I’m rethinking letting my chickens roam free. My new chicken house will be ready as early as next week, and I was hoping to get biddies in early April.

Safely down